Feb 2010 – Dune’s New Messiah (IGN)

Morel: “We’re starting from scratch. Peter had an approach which was not mine at all, and we’re starting over again. I don’t think we’re going to keep any elements of the Peter Berg script. It was good, actually. It was interesting. It was just not our vision.“

“Dune is such a huge, huge project… it’s challenging, it’s long-term — we’re only starting. We have to rewrite the script, we have to develop a whole universe. It’s going to be a long thing, so who knows. But I’m passionate about Dune so I’d love to do it next.”

[Regarding internal monologues]“That’s one of the challenges, yes – everything that is in Paul’s head, we’ll have to show it on screen and find the right approach to make it visually interesting. But I think the technology we have now allows us much more than we could do before, so we’ll see.”

Tribeca Film’s Jenni Miller: Do you plan to infuse it with some action?Morel: “I don’t know. It’s all about—I’m a huge Dune fan, a reader, like for 30 years; I read it when I was a teenager. I’ve read it 10 times maybe, so I want to stay true to the book. Saying that, I also think that there’s a lot of scenes that are not described in the books—it’s just mentioned, like the bad guys attacking something—and it might make sense to include those in the movie, not just by mentioning it but showing them, and that would maybe [call for] some action scenes, yes. It’s not about action. It’s not the point. It’s not about [making] an action movie. It’s just doing Dune. It’s like a huge universe thing, and there’s such a fanbase, like guys who have been reading that forever—you can’t mess with that.”

(Emphasis mine). This is the single most encouraging thing I’ve posted here so far. Against my better judgement… I like this director.

“We’re starting from scratch,” says Morel. “Peter had an approach which was not mine at all, and we’re starting over again. I don’t think we’re going to keep any elements of the Peter Berg script. It was good, actually. It was interesting. It was just not our vision.